


Army

by carnography (orphan_account)



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, angst out the ass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-21
Updated: 2015-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-14 08:32:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3403958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/carnography
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her attempts at affection seem halfhearted, like a habit that's lost its charm</p>
<p>(Season 4.5, Post-"Somewhere to Watch Over Me")</p>
            </blockquote>





	Army

His hand sweeps along the pale, cold line of her arm. She shudders, and he pretends not to notice.  
  
For the past few weeks, he’s feigned contentment. If only for her sake, because he knows all of this is for his. According to Laura, with the exhausted way in which she relents, his sake depends on how frequently they frak. That’s how she’s dealt with men in the past, he’s learned. He gets off, she gets off (scott-free). Paralyzing crimes of distance, a heart in absentia--the way she looks at him (the way she does sometimes) with unforgiving eyes as he pours himself a shot.  
  
(He always knocks it back with one suicidal gulp.)  
  
Her feeble attempts at affection--small glances that once set his stomach fluttering--seem halfhearted. Like a habit that's lost its charm. And its all to placate him, to lead him astray.  
  
She gets away with it. (So does he.)  
  
She’s scared and she’s angry. And he sees her--existing under that funeral shroud of hair, Persephone with her eyes on the pomegranate and her hands tucked under her head. Blank--as if watching her little demons doing a little jig on his Libran carpets. No tears. Just good, quiet suffering. And he hates it.  
  
He wants to rip her open, and cure her of her illness by force. And this one compulsion burrows into his head, and haunts his every movement, and turns into a snarling resentment. He drinks and he drinks, and he drinks until the moaning of his dying ship is nothing but a whalesong and everything fizzles out into a blurry half-there dream.  
  
Stumbling and bumbling, he convinces himself that in a few moments he’ll wake to a warm spray of sunlight across his cheek and his nose buried in a riot of soft hair. The atmosphere smelling like June and his arm swung over a naked back, sheets tickling the hair of his forearm. He imagines these impossible mornings--over and over and over. He imagines her turning over with sleep dusting her eyes. Languid grins, breeze rustling the curtains. Fingernails trailing along his scalp. He wants to feel her overflow. A throaty chuckle as he whispers something witty or lewd into the curve of a breast.  
  
Wooden cabins, glass lakes--a daydream that’s become an obsession.  
  
He kisses her shoulder blade as they lie in the dark, deep inside the belly of this warship. His lover is dying. She’s bald and she’s thin. His fingers dig into her too-angular waist.  
  
He can see her bones now. The little strength, the little weight that she'd gained after cutting off her treatments...it’s all gone now. Hipbones, jutting ribs, the delicate notches of her spine. He can trace her skeleton with a finger. And she’s so small that he’s terrified he’ll cleave her in two. When he’s pounding into her surrendered body. Relentless. Hand gripping the shelf--anguished breath that feels like fire pumping out of his lungs.  
  
And he never summons the will to stop. He loves her too much.  
  
She’s right. He needs it. He needs it, but he needs Laura more.  
  
The battlestar creaks and she shifts, facing away from him. She’s awake.  
  
She never seems to sleep anymore.  
  
“I hear Chief Tyrol confessed,” she utters, still fixated on Boomer and little Hera. It’s all he’s heard for the last few days and he’s getting a little sick of it.  
  
“Yeah,” he grunts. “Threw him in the brig this morning.”  
  
“Did he say why he did it?”  
  
Bill moves away from her, separating them with an arm on the mattress. “Yeah.  He did.”  
  
“And?”  
  
His hand feels heavy, so heavy, as he wipes it across his face and through his hair. The strands feel dirty, caked with sweat and stink. “Boomer...played him. Showed him things. A daughter.” He pauses. “A house.”  
  
“Projection. They choose to see the world the way they want to. Not how it is,” she breathes, quiet for a few moments. “Apparently, the Sixes see everything as a forest.”  
  
He looks up at the overhang of his bunk. It reminds him of a cave. It’s stupid, but sometimes, he likes to think they’re only here for the winter. Just for one long, brutal winter.   
  
“Defense mechanism.”  
  
She hums, but it’s a sad sound. “It’s funny. How they can engineer the ugliest parts of us into some twisted...” She struggles for words. “War, projection, de-”  
  
‘Death’ dies on her tongue. She lapses into silence.  
  
‘No’, he thinks but does not say. Laura likes to imagine vast differences between human and cylon. He used to. Now, he knows better. He saw the Chief that morning, racked with guilt, his voice trembling as he confessed. Red eyes and tear tracks. Quivering hands. Bill offered him a drink and the Chief took that shot like a man on death row. He was broken.  
  
Broken in a way that a man, not a machine, is broken.  
  
Consumed by Boomer’s fantasies, cannibalized by his own.  
  
Of a daughter.  
  
Of a house.  
  
Of sunlight and sanded oak. Of laundry billowing--wide and white--over a garden that thrives in the black earth.  
  
Of a woman (hopefully-maybe-yes, a wife) peeking out between two linen sheets. The valley of her spine bright with summer mornings.  
  
A daydream. An obsession.  
  
An escape from that good, quiet suffering.  
  
Beside him, Laura sighs--a pretty, light murmur that sounds just as he imagines and just as he remembers.  
  
She’s sleeping now.  
  
And for some reason, she doesn’t look quite as fragile or quite as thin. Not as unforgiving, with her demons at rest. For now.  
  
Bill looks at the byzantine pattern etched into the bulkheads, at the worn plating that’s coming apart. His eyes feel heavy but his heart pounds quick.  
  
He’s scared and he’s angry.  
  
He never seems to sleep anymore.


End file.
